Destructoid - Publishers accused of trying to exploit Kickstarter."We were actually contacted by some publishers over the last few months that wanted to use us to do a Kickstarter," he revealed on his team's own KS page. "I said to them 'So, you want us to do a Kickstarter for, using our name, we then get the Kickstarter money to make the game, you then publish the game, but we then don't get to keep the brand we make and we only get a portion of the profits.'

Ruffiana wrote on Sep 20, 2012, 14:22:Apart from the 'keeping the brand' part, what's the big deal? Kickstarting money won't publish, market, distribute, and do all of the behind the scenes wheeling and dealing to get a boxed game on the shelf of Walmarts and GameStops of the world. There's still unarguably a market for boxed games. There's a market, money to be made, and for all of the shitty things that publishers have done to the game industry, knowing how to make money with a complete game ready to go into a box and be sold is not one of the problems.

Asking for a portion of the profits from those sales isn't unreasonable. It's still a huge investment of time and resources to publish a finished game.

Demanding onwership of the IP to publish a game you haven't paid to develop is pretty greedy. That's an entrenched mindset from decades of an established business model where the publisher is fronting and advance so a game can be made in the first place.

Yeah. Offloading risk directly onto the customer and developer with none yourself, and then acquiring the fruits of their labor, what's malicious about that!?

There is this new thing called digital distribution, most Kickstarters (beyond rewards) forgo physical copies of their games altogether. If you're making a PC game (as obsidian is in this case) you're cutting yourself out of a very small margin of the market by going digital only, and arguably you might be able to net more profit due to no cost associated with publishing of that manner. This applies to many platforms, and there on all these platforms there are digital-only titles that are quite successful. They don't need EA/Activision/Whoever to get the job done, and there are plenty of titles that exist and prove that point.